Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Ask the Expert Series: A Conversation on Poetry
Ricochetti Concretevol came up with the idea to start a conversation where he would share his expertise: Concrete Questions Conversation. His real purpose was to attempt to claim the prize for worst poster when the contest rolls around next year, but he wound up starting a fascinating thread. It’s also a fascinating idea for a conversation. We have so much expertise gathered on Ricochet from a wide variety of fields of endeavor. So, I thought it would be fun for those who can to share their expertise.
Like many Ricochetti, I have several areas of expertise. But most of them are shared by several other people on Ricochet. For instance, we have many published authors here, so questions on the general topic of writing could be answered by many here as Aaron proved in his Fictional Advice for Fictional Authors conversation. Corporate governance might be another expertise that is easy to find on Ricochet. Many lawyers deal with the topic. Many of our members have surely also been on boards of commercial, non-profit, or governmental corporations. While they may not have abstracted the experiences in quite the way I have, if a question were put out on the subject, there might be a dozen or more answers available immediately. Some of my other areas of consulting expertise might be scarcer on the ground at Ricochet, but how many people are likely to have questions involving process management or data modeling? Of the things I know that there is a remote chance that people may have some curiosity about, the only thing left would be poetry. This includes poetic structures, meter, rhyme, rhythm, the prosody of many nations, and all those things we are supposed to believe disappeared in a free verse post-modernist world. If you have questions about how to write a better poem, how to approach a form, how to do anything regarding poetry, share the questions here and I shall try to answer them comprehensibly.
Now, Concretevol had questions from another member to start things out. I will start with a few questions from my FAQ sheet on one of my Websites.
Q. How does somebody create a new poetic form?
A. As poets, sometimes we conform to someone else’s standard, as when we write a sonnet. Other times we invent a new structure for a given situation and poem. If we codify the rules of the new form, find a name for it, reuse it, and share the form definition with other formalists who use it, it becomes a new form. If we only use the form once, don’t write down the rules, or if no other poets get excited by it, the form is just a nonce form, meaning used once.
In my own work, I’ve found at least four ways to create new poetry forms:
- Make something up for a specific poetic occasion. Form follows function, and sometimes I find I’ve created a form that is reusable when writing a specific poem.
- Vary on a theme:. As an example, when I first started using form, I couldn’t scan a poem to save my life — no rhythm — so had great difficulty with accentual-syllabic forms, such as the English sonnet. Given this, I created my own form of sonnet, the sardine, that is purely syllabic by definition. Of course, I didn’t have to do that given that the French also produce purely syllabic Petrarchan sonnets, but it seemed a great idea at the time. This brings up another point.
- Play to your handicaps and strengths. If there is something about a form that you can’t do or don’t like, consider changing the form rules for your own use. In developing the sardine, I actually used two existing forms. First was the Petrarchan sonnet; second was the redondilla, a purely syllabic Spanish quatrain with envelope rhyme scheme (abba). Based on this mixing, I came up with a fourteen line form that was syllabic, but was also tougher to rhyme than other sonnets. I’m much better at rhyming than a lot of people. (That isn’t to say that I don’t put out some real klinkers in my light verse.) So, the sonondilla’s predominant rhyme scheme is abbaabbaccddcc, which is even more difficult than the Petrarchan sonnet to do well.
- Analyze present forms for gaps. While writing a book on poetic forms that is still in progress, I came across an interesting fact about the ballade family. There is the ballade and the ballade supreme, a slightly longer variation. There are also the double ballade and double ballade supreme. Lastly, there is a double refrain ballade, but no double refrain ballade supreme. Well, being a poet with an engineer’s soul, or vice versa, I thought it best to fill the gap. Now I have a definition for the double refrain ballade supreme: a 35 line isosyllabic form divided into three ten line verses and a five-line envoy. Each line is usually eight or ten syllables long. It has two refrains. The rhyming and repeating structure are thus: ababbCcdcD ababbCcdcD ababbCcdcD cCdcD.
Knowing what elements define the different existing structures helps to understand how to create new ones.
Q. When you sit down in front of a blank page/screen and decide to write a villanelle, as an example, how do you approach it. I would assume, the theme comes first. Then what? Do you write down the rhyme scheme, find the first line and go from there?
A. Each form is different. For instance, with a Villanelle, it’s best to start with the couplet, the two refrains. They appear throughout separately and together and have to function as a final couplet.
The same is true of the Triolet, which also has a couplet. It’s scheme is ABaAabAB, so the first line (A) is a refrain that appears alone once, and with the repeton (B) twice. I start with that couplet.
A Sonnet I usually start with an idea and the turn of thought or pivot. I find it easier to develop the whole if I have the pivot in mind from the start.
A Sestina is a difficult form where you need to find six very flexible words as the repetitive end words. That is often the first step.
A Tyburn is similar, requiring one to find the first four words/phrases that will work together. The hardest part is finding a rhyme that will allow the structure.
I guess summing it up, I would say that you find the most difficult part to make work, and tackle that as your starting point. Once you have that down, the rest flows relatively easily.
Q. How does form influence creation?
A. Art is never done in freedom. All art, all creation, is done under constraints. There are several types of constraint in art: monetary, temporal, intentional, and artificial among them.
An architect will produce a different office building with a fifteen million dollar budget than with a one million dollar budget. If a sculptor gets a commission for a work, he may use different materials based on the cost of materials versus the amount of the commission. Maybe the sculpture will be marble instead of steel because of the cost of materials and price to work it. A painter who cannot afford a huge canvas may be able to afford a packet of smaller ones, so he’ll paint six miniatures rather than a wall-spanning canvas. Those are monetary constraints. Unless you are taking poetic commissions, you are unlikely to run into this type of constraint. Poetry usually takes time rather than money to produce. For a poet, a monetary constraint might come with enough cash to get his book an ISBN.
A temporal constraint deals with time. Does the building have to be finished before October when the snow flies in Minnesota? Does the sculpture have to be done by April 16th for the degree show? Does the painting have to be done by tomorrow for a gallery opening? These are examples of temporal constraints. Again, unless you are taking commissions or publishing, time constraints are seldom a factor. You might have to put out a poem for your wife’s birthday or write her one for your anniversary, but usually this isn’t a factor for poets.
The other two constraints are the ones we deal with every day.
Intentional constraints deal with purpose. If the architect is building an apartment house rather than an office building, it changes the specific applications of the building code. It changes the plumbing capacity needed. It changes the parking lot to space ratio. It changes many other factors. If the sculptor is building a work based on a commission from the city fathers, it will probably be more sedate than something created for a student degree show. If the painter is doing a portrait of a lady, it will be different than an urban mural of sea mammals on the wall of an opera house. Intention is reflected in the why. For a poet, writer or speechifier, one set of intentional constraints is the communication goals. Are we trying to inform, persuade, query, entertain, or some combination? A limerick is entertaining, but seldom meets the other three goals. A haiku is informative. It is good for painting an image in a few words, but would be terrible for persuasion. This brings us to the next set of constraints.
Artificial constraints are those imposed by the environment, tools, and materials. A brick building has different qualities than a glass and steel construction, as well as different strengths and weaknesses. A sculptor using steel works differently than one using stone. Different tools are used for the different media. One is cut and chipped away; the other heated, bent, and welded. A painter with a 4″ x 6″ canvas and oils is going to produce a different landscape than an artist with a 3′ x 4′ canvas and acrylic paints. For a poet, form is the set of artificial constraints. Ideally, form follows function. In other words, the intentional constraints are imposed first, which directs the artist to the form. An architect doesn’t look at a pile of bricks that he has laying around and think: “Gee, I can build something. I wonder what I should build?” Most of them have a commission or plan in their hands before they consider what materials will be used. With a poet, ideally one knows what one is trying to accomplish, and one can pick the form that best meets that potential.
The truth is that there is interplay. If the best form to achieve the goals and subject of the poem is a ballade, but the poet has never heard of a ballade, he may use a villanelle instead. Maybe the poet is required to write a Shakespearean sonnet for a class, so he determines his purpose for the poem based on that constraint.
Getting then to the meat of the issue, form influences creation through the interplay of intent with the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the form. A diamante is not a narrative form. It is created out of sixteen discrete words that do not interact grammatically. Instead, there are two base words, antonyms, which the other words describe or relate to. The only way that the diamante conveys a story is through the choice of a title and the direction downward from one polar opposite to the other. A ballad is meant to tell a story. A haiku is meant to convey an image, perhaps a metaphor comparing a natural event with a human one. Haiku is not meant to tell tales in the same way as the ballad. You can’t do with seventeen syllables what you can with hundreds of words.
Earlier I discussed finding the starting point of the poem. For each form it is different based on the hardest part of creating that form. For the haiku, it is in coming up with a fresh natural metaphor to describe something. After that, finding the words that convey that image in seventeen syllables is relatively easy. In writing a villanelle, creating the two refrains, which act both independently and as a couplet, is the most important factor in creating a successful villanelle. Of course, choosing the two rhymes is important, too. If you choose a rhyme ending that is hard to bring six or eight words on the topic to bear, things can get ugly. For instance, in my The Life and Times of Leaf the Red, the last word in the middle line of the first tercet is “travel.” I wound up with difficult going on the rhyme, following with: unravel, gravel, gavel, unravels, and gravel. It’s a good thing it is a bit of light verse, or I’d have to rewrite that with a new rhyme. Basically, you have to determine what the most important or difficult part of the form is and start there. This is another way that form interacts with the creative process.
So, those are a few questions to get things started. Let’s see if poetic form is as interesting a subject as concrete, or whether Concretevol just picked the wrong subject to be an expert in if he wanted to be the worst poster of the year. (And if you haven’t, I do urge you to check out Concretevol’s thread. It’s very interesting.)
Published in General
If you’re having CoC problems, I feel bad for you son.
I got 99 problems, but that ain’t one.
I’m from rags to riches poet, I ain’t dumb
I got 99 problems but [edit] ain’t one.
Hit me.
Claire,
Are you proposing a rap-off, or something?
(With a bad French accent): “My love for you is like concrete!”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t67ztstUhkA
There once was a lady in Paris
Whose keyboard was now and then garrilous.
She was given the key
To the C O C,
But does she really desire to dare us?
But I am Ricochet, and I was wont to be
Alone in this fair garden, till you came
Unasked by night; I am true Ricochet, I fill
This cordial conversation with mutual flame.
‘Then sighing, said the other, ‘Have thy will, I am the word that dare not speak its name,
(And thus it was promptly edited it to conform to our CoC.)
Claire, for clarification please give one example of someone who won an arguement against you……..and I’m not going to be the next one to go down in flames! ;)
Well thankfully, memory draws a curtain of charity over all the times it’s happened since yesterday. But I’m sure as I’ll see the sun rise tomorrow that it will happen before tomorrow. When it does, I’ll come back to let you know.
Claire,
I’m not sure why, but your poem reminded me of a translation I did some time back:
The House Would Be Surrounded by Roses…
The house would be surrounded by roses and wasps.
We’d hear the call to vespers in the afternoon;
and sweet, white grapes, the color of transparent stone,
would seem to sleep to the sun under the slow shade.
I would love you there. I would give you all my heart,
which is twenty-four years old, my mocking spirit,
my honor and my poetry of white roses;
and yet I do not know you, you do not exist.
I know only that, if you were alive, and if
you were, like me, at the bottom of the meadow,
we would kiss while laughing under the yellow bees,
close to the fresh brook, and under the many leaves.
Only the heat of the sun would be heard singing.
You would have the shade of the hazel trees on you,
then would we kiss each other, ceasing our laughter,
to express our love that cannot be said with words;
and I would find, there on the red of your sweet lips,
the taste of white grapes, the red roses and the wasps.
It is based on Francis Jammes’ La Maison Serait Pleine de Roses…
Why he wanted to taste wasps on her lips, I don’t know.
Well, it’s not really a “lost argument,” but if you go over to the French Revolution thread, you’ll find that even before sunrise, Leigh found something I’d written that was so wrong I had to go back to correct it. (I wrote “Paine” when I meant “Burke,” leaving the whole thread wondering just what I was talking about.)
“Bee-stung lips” is a thing.
And since you seem to be pretty good at translating Jammes, I’ll let you do the honors for those of us who can’t read him in French. But this is a tricky translation, because you want to preserve all that ambiguity around “mon âme est obscure,” and because French lets you do a few things here more compactly, so keeping that formal structure while preserving all that meaning requires a very poetic soul–and good technique. Also, “jacinthe” is a lovelier word than “hyacinth.” If I wanted to take huge poetic licence, so to speak, I might be tempted to translate it as “lily.” Fortunately … I can ask the expert!
How would you do it?
I suppose as long as I am on my translations, I have a few that are more appropriate to this season:
Winter, You’re Quite the Villain
Winter, you’re quite the villain;
Summer is pleasant and gentle
as witnesses May and April,
its company eve and mornin’.
Summer lines fields, woods and flowers
in her livery of verdure
and many other colors
by the arrangements of nature.
Of snow and wind, sleet and rain,
you, my Winter, are too full.
You, someone must ban and expel.
Without aim to please, I speak plain,
Winter, you’re quite the villain.
A translation of “Yver, vous n’estes qu’un vilain” by Charles d’Orléans.
And for something less French:
Gustav Falke’s Winter
A white field, an undisturbed field.
From a violet-blue cloud bank
far in back on the horizon,
the moon’s red edge softly rises.
Rising fully out and level—
soon enough a round disk drifts there
in gloomy glow. And by the field
a crow sounds his hoarse “Caw! Caw! Caw!”
Vaporous by the winter night,
the great, dark bird glides over snow,
and below, his shadow scurries,
even blacker and without sound.
True. It could take me awhile. It has been years since I translated the other poem, and if I remember, I dropped the original rhyme scheme and just tried to retain the Alexandrines. A good translation takes time, so I hope you aren’t in a hurry.
The danger in changing the flower is the loss of the myth. I’ll try to give it a shot soon.
Also, mightn’t you need a flower with a “doux regard bleu”? In other words, a blue flower, that can “gaze” at you? Your standard lily isn’t blue. (And a “blue lily” happens to look like a round hyacinth.)
Not that I actually speak French, so I could be wrong.
Should I consider it odd that the only places I see this online is where it is posted by “Cochonfucius” in four places where Jammes’ “Deux ancolies” is posted?
If you see me back on this thread today, scold me and chase me off. I am supposed to be working on another piece today. So this is now officially procrastination, no matter how much I try to call it work.
But I’ll be back. Poetry’s not going out of style, right?
Never!